“Postman” kicks off the Femmes Noirs series this weekend in NYC.
I’ll go to Manhattan at the drop of a hat. And my stylish chapeau is now officially earthbound because there’s a three-week Femmes Noirs series running at Film Forum! Yes, my silver-screen sisters in crime are radiating duplicity and depravity in classic flicks, programmed by Bruce Goldstein, through Aug. 7.
Titles include: “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” “Mildred Pierce,” “Leave Her to Heaven,” “Out of the Past,” “Pandora’s Box,” “Niagara,” “Angel Face” “The Killers,” “Gilda,” “The Lady from Shanghai,” “Scarlet Street,” “Murder, My Sweet,” “The Maltese Falcon,” “Kiss Me Deadly,” “The Killing,” “Gun Crazy,” “Detour,” “Dead Reckoning,” “Pitfall,” “Sudden Fear,” “Tension,” “Body Heat,” “Fatal Attraction,” “The Strange Love of Martha Ivers,” “Too Late for Tears” and the prototype for the genre, “Double Indemnity.”
It pains me to write this list and think I might miss some of these! And, to top it off, the forum’s neighboring restaurant, Clarkson, is offering a complimentary Manhattan Noir cocktail when patrons present a ticket stub. And here I am left to rough it in LA, sipping champagne poolside. But maybe I can finagle a way to head east on someone else’s dime or lure Goldstein to LA for a second run of the series. There is of course one major omission in the forum’s lineup: the irredeemably bad Jean Gillie in “Decoy.” As Leonard Maltin put it: She makes Barbara Stanwyck’s character in “Double Indemnity” look like Snow White.”
From FNB readers